Recent reviews by Rynea

Super boring and thin content.

The Leviathan's Fantasy is a genre mix of different game types, but mostly leaning towards the city builder / strategy game. You have your various resources, your various building types that produce, refine and upgrade items in various ways, along with a part of the game that is more reminiscent of RPG's where you can order around different adventurers to do different tasks.

Overall it is definitely not a bad game, but while it offers a lot of content, it sadly is not the most refined in many cases.
The controls with the mouse are clunky and often not properly responsive, making you click several times because the interface just doesn't react at all or behaves wierdly. The tutorial feels forced, explaining you all of "the obvious things" while the really questionable parts are left unanswered.

The graphics are nice and the variety in the different game types makes you want to play more to find out all of its intricacies. Music is okay, but for long sessions gets repetitive quickly.

It is unique and very charming in its own way, making for very nice relaxed gameplay, which makes it hard to decide if I would recommend it or not. Overall I'd say for me playing for around 10 hours now it's somewhere in between. It's not as refined and stable as I wish it would be, with being stuck in menus and having to save + reload twice and one outright crash but for the relatively low price and the amount of content, for me it barely makes the cut to be on the positive side.

Currently the game is not playable in Online mode, with loading times between 2 and 15 minutes when loading into areas that take you like 1-2 minutes to play through. No improvement since launch, which was 24 hours ago.

Unless you plan to play Offline only ie. if you want to play with friends, stay away from this and wait until they actually fix their issues.

Fun survivor game in the DRG universe. Still a bit thin on content, but the things that are in like weapons and upgrades are all very fitting and uniquely fun to play around with.

Cuisineer is a mix between a dungeon grinding and cooking game. You enter dungeons to receive gear as well as ingredients to cook with in your restaurant that you have taken over from your parents. Overall it does this decently well.

It shines with its cute graphics, decent music and a fast paced combat system with various weapons and combinations. Overall at my pace it's probably around 30 hours gametime to see most of the main story parts of the game, with another 30 grind heavy hours to clean up everything, collect everything and max everything out.

Cuisineer does extremely well with several aspects of a game and feels a little lacking in others.

First of all, the mix between time management and cooking as well as the action combat is extremely well integrated. It's a very relaxed title, that never puts any time pressure on you during your "off time" in town, which I really like, while still giving you action combat time in limited time bursts that make for fun activity to shake things up. You never feel like you run after the main story and can take as long as you like.

The graphics are really cute and well done, all the way from the characters, world down to every interface button the style fits very well together. Music score, while limited in variety, is also really nice and matches well together with everything else.

The game features an awesome storage system. You can access your ingredients from your chests both for cooking and for upgrades. If you hover over ingredients you even see the amount of items you have in your storage and inventory, which is awesome for tracking amounts you already collected while out exploring. The only time you grab items directly for handing them over is for quests.

The downsides are there as well, though for me it was mostly about the "I wish there was more" kind. The game lacks a bit in depth and variety. it offers no ways of automation, both in collecting ingredients as well as well as running your restaurant. No waitress job positions to hire, no cashier to collect the money, you run back and forth for everything on your own, which is fun the first few times you are doing it and part of the action, but I wished for more improvement mechanics late game as it definitely gets dull after ou've done this countless times.

I really hope to see some DLC at some point to add more layers and depth to the already nice basis and offer more end game focus. More automation, more variety in both weapons and their synergies and maybe a sprinkle more customization for the parts of the restaurant like the counters and entrance carpet, that currently is fixed and unchangeable.

To sum it up, for me Cuisineer is definitely worth the money if you enjoy a grind intensive collection and cooking game mix and I really hope to see more of this title/series.

Update 29.10.2023 - After the first changes to graphic performance it runs now at a playable level on my RTX 3090. While this might not be super helpful for people with older GPUs, it is at least something in the right direction I guess. The game still suffers from many of the same bugs base Ark had since years, as well as some new ones, as such, I can't honestly see this as an improvement yet. If they finally fix their bugs, maybe it will be. It looks like a reskin of Ark currently with some changes.

Some adaptions, like the Map with editable waypoint markers are nice, but the implementation of said stuff leaves much to be desired and were just rushed but never properly completed. Nothing in the whole game seems to have gone through any QA whatsoever as the messed up height level of stones near the starter locations shows.

Waypoint Markers cannot be shared with others properly, death marks never really point to your corpse or bag and finding things with the new foliage and mesh where everything seems to just 'disappear' even if its just 1 meter away from where you stand is annoying without having any options to highlight items close by or some other indication of corpses etc. It's a typical situation where something was implemented in the game without ever testing it and going through a second round of improvements afterwards to make it not just good on paper, but actually good in game.

Landscape is prettier to look at, character models feel about the same to me in quality and can look odd with some settings and overall I get annoyed by the lighting with areas being either too bright or too dark to play most of the time.

For those with powerful GPUs, while 40€ is expensive for a reskin, if you want to have pretty landscape and like Ark it might be worth it. For everyone else not as enthusiastic or with an older GPU, I still can't really recommend it. Wait for more performance and stability improvements. Maybe we even see proper bugfixing this time, then it might even make it into my recommended list.

Very fun roguelite, lots of weapons, lots of combinations, lots of cute characters.

Very nice mix between a city management strategy game and a roguelite similar to Vampire Survivors. Still a bit rough around the edges with some functionality and translation, making you go "huh, how is this supposed to work" , but the core gameplay loop is there and very fun and we regularly see patches that bring improved functionality and bugfixes.

Oh, and it also looks pretty nice. Come pet your mystical divine beast now and join the sect dwelling village owners. Very recommended!

While at its current low price, one might argue that its not a big deal, but sadly this game is currently lacking in pretty much all aspects of this genre that I've come to love and enjoy. It's about the same experience as a hamburger for half the price, but its lacking a patty. If you are looking for a hamburger, likely not worth it unless you look for just a bun.

I don't think I have to talk about originality of the gameplay itself. It's pretty much a clone of vampire survivors and its competitors, down to the very group of mobs swarming in from time to time. While other games advance the genre in some way, I was rather disappointed by this one. It feels like it doesn't bring all that many new aspects to the table to make it enjoyable.

The interface has no tooltips, leaving you guessing what you have equipped after a while. Spells are spread out over several screens instead of having a compact single screen overview making you switch pages all the time in order to optimize. It's a hassle. The lack of other features like a map, more hotkeys or the like simply isn't as noticable because the game is so basic you don't really need most of it. Barebones areas, lacking sounds and controls to do much and repetitive gameloop.

Everyone brings out half baked early access games these days, but early access tags are no excuse for a shoddy core game play. Early access is when you have a proper game that needs polish, not when you have a game prototype that barely does anything at all. That might just be my personal opinion here, as early access can be understood as pretty much anything these days. Take this opinion for what it is then.

To summarize, I'd stay away from this barebones prototype, as you can find better games with tons more content, better interface, better sound effects and a better allround gaming experience for just a few $ more.

Lots of fun and content for this price. Has quite the depth and unlockign new things is quite fun and entertaining in its own way.